The present disclosure relates generally to medical devices and, more specifically, to medical monitoring devices for monitoring a patient's physiology and health status.
In the field of medicine, physicians often desire to monitor multiple physiological characteristics of their patients. Oftentimes, patient monitoring involves the use of several separate monitoring devices simultaneously, such as a pulse oximeter, a blood pressure monitor, a heart monitor, a temperature monitor, etc. Several separate patient monitoring devices are often connected to a patient, tethering the patient to multiple bulky bedside devices via physical wiring or cables. Multi-parameter monitors are also available where different sensor sets may be connected to a single monitor. However, such multi-parameter systems may be even more restrictive than separate monitoring devices because they require all of the sensors attached to a patient to be physically attached to a single monitor, resulting in multiple wires running across the patient's body. Thus, currently available patient monitoring devices often inhibit patient movement, requiring a patient to stay in one location or to transport a large monitor with them when they move from one place to another.
Further, currently available monitoring devices are often power intensive and either require being plugged in to a wall outlet or require large battery units that have to be replaced and recharged every few hours. Thus, monitoring multiple patient parameters is power intensive and battery replacement is costly in labor and parts. Thus, frequent monitoring is often avoided in order to limit cost and patient discomfort, and instead patient parameters are infrequently spot checked, such as by periodic nurse visits one or a few times a day. While there are some patients that require continuous, real-time monitoring, such as those patients experiencing a critical health condition, the vast majority of patients need only periodic monitoring to check that their condition has not changed. However, patients that are not being regularly monitored may encounter risky health situations that that go undetected for a period of time, such as where rapid changes occur in physiological parameters that are not checked by a clinician until hours later or until a critical situation occurs.
Presently, wireless patient monitoring systems are being developed in which a wearable sensing device is positioned on the patient to monitor one or more physiological parameters of the patient. The sensing device communicates sensed information to one or more monitoring hubs for analysis and review. Typically, the wireless sensing devices are battery powered and rely upon the battery to provide communication to the monitoring hub.
Since wireless sensing devices are made as small as possible, the wireless monitoring devices can be misplaced, lost or inadvertently removed from the patient environment. This often occurs when a sensor falls off of the patient and becomes concealed within the sheet. The sensor can then be taken out of the room when the sheets are removed from the bed for cleaning. Since the wireless sensing devices are designed for reuse, it is desirable to identify lost sensing devices.